Various types of sound controlled toys are known and have been proposed. U.S. Pat. No. 5,209,695, to one of the present inventors, describes a voice controlled toy which operates on word counting rather than word recognition. The disclosure of U.S. Pat. No. 5,209,695 is hereby incorporated herein by reference. Other types of voice controlled toys, such as those employing word recognition, are also known as are various other types of sound controlled toys.